The Viral Macrodomain Counters Host Antiviral ADP-Ribosylation

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.Macrodomains, enzymes that remove ADP-ribose from proteins, are encoded by several families of RNA viruses and have recently been shown to counter innate immune responses to virus infection. ADP-ribose is covalently attached to target proteins by poly-ADP-ribose polymerases (PARPs), using nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) as a substrate. This modification can have a wide variety of effects on proteins including alteration of enzyme activity, protein–protein interactions, and protein stability. Several PARPs are induced by interferon (IFN) and are known to have antiviral properties, implicating ADP-ribosylation in the host defense response and suggesting that viral macrodomains may counter this response. Recent studies have demonstrated that viral macrodomains do counter the innate immune response by interfering with PARP-mediated antiviral defenses, stress granule formation, and pro-inflammatory cytokine production. Here, we will describe the known functions of the viral macrodomains and review recent literature demonstrating their roles in countering PARP-mediated antiviral responses

Complete Insecurity of Quantum Protocols for Classical Two-Party Computation

A fundamental task in modern cryptography is the joint computation of a function which has two inputs, one from Alice and one from Bob, such that neither of the two can learn more about the other's input than what is implied by the value of the function. In this Letter, we show that any quantum protocol for the computation of a classical deterministic function that outputs the result to both parties (two-sided computation) and that is secure against a cheating Bob can be completely broken by a cheating Alice. Whereas it is known that quantum protocols for this task cannot be completely secure, our result implies that security for one party implies complete insecurity for the other. Our findings stand in stark contrast to recent protocols for weak coin tossing, and highlight the limits of cryptography within quantum mechanics. We remark that our conclusions remain valid, even if security is only required to be approximate and if the function that is computed for Bob is different from that of Alice.Comment: v2: 6 pages, 1 figure, text identical to PRL-version (but reasonably formatted

New Irish in the News

THIS ARTICLE PRESENTS selected findings from the ‘Media for Diversity and Migrant Integration’ project (hereafter MEDIVA), a European Union funded project involving six Member States (Ireland, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and the UK), which aimed to assess the capacity of media to reflect the increasing ethnocultural diversity of European societies. The specific focus of the project was on Third Country Nationals (TNCs) or persons without European Union citizenship. In this article we present the project’s content findings for Ireland, focusing specifically on representations of TNCs in a range of national print and broadcast outlets

Assessing the benefits of pyramids and seed treatments for soybean aphid host plant resistance

Soybean aphid resistant varieties were first released commercially in 2010. Currently all commercially available resistant varieties incorporate the Rag1 (Resistance to Aphis glycines) gene. Research from the past three years have shown: Across multiple states and years, Rag1 containing-soybeans have fewer aphids than aphid-susceptible soybeans; When aphids are present in a field, Rag1 containing-soybeans are never aphid free (Mardorf et al. 2010); Rag1 does not limit yield (Kim and Diers 2009, Mardorf et al. 2010); and Combining Rag1 and Rag2 in a soybean line provides more resistance than Rag1 or Rag2 alone (Wiarda et al. 2011)

Influence of the Rag1 and Rag2 genes on aphid resistance and agronomic performance of soybean lines

Aphids have been causing economic damage to soybean in the United States since 2000 (Hartman et al., 2001). High aphid density on soybeans causes the yield to decrease due to plant damage including leaf puckering, plant stunting, reduced pod and/or seed counts, and smaller seeds (Rice et al., 2008). In addition, the black sooty mold fungus that grows on aphid honeydew has a negative influence on soybean performance by reducing photosynthesis (Beckendorf et al., 2008)

Experimental and computational analyses reveal that environmental restrictions shape HIV-1 spread in 3D cultures

Here, using an integrative experimental and computational approach, Imle et al. show how cell motility and density affect HIV cell-associated transmission in a three-dimensional tissue-like culture system of CD4+ T cells and collagen, and how different collagen matrices restrict infection by cell-free virions

On Notions of Security for Deterministic Encryption, and Efficient Constructions without Random Oracles

The study of deterministic public-key encryption was initiated by Bellare et al. (CRYPTO~\u2707), who provided the ``strongest possible notion of security for this primitive (called PRIV) and constructions in the random oracle (RO) model. We focus on constructing efficient deterministic encryption schemes \emph{without} random oracles. To do so, we propose a slightly weaker notion of security, saying that no partial information about encrypted messages should be leaked as long as each message is a-priori hard-to-guess \emph{given the others} (while PRIV did not have the latter restriction). Nevertheless, we argue that this version seems adequate for certain practical applications. We show equivalence of this definition to single-message and indistinguishability-based ones, which are easier to work with. Then we give general constructions of both chosen-plaintext (CPA) and chosen-ciphertext-attack (CCA) secure deterministic encryption schemes, as well as efficient instantiations of them under standard number-theoretic assumptions. Our constructions build on the recently-introduced framework of Peikert and Waters (STOC \u2708) for constructing CCA-secure \emph{probabilistic} encryption schemes, extending it to the deterministic-encryption setting and yielding some improvements to their original results as well